I was one of the designers at BEA for four years. (BEA made WebLogic, a leading J2EE server.) Indeed, J2EE requires a lot of annoying boilerplate. Yes, you have to let the IDE handle it for you, which is fine for writing code but not so great for reading (someone else's, or even your own) code.

I will assert, though I can't demonstrate it, that had this been done in Lisp, the boilerplate problem could have been substantially alleviated by using Lisp macros. One piece of evidence: J2EE has improved this problem substantially by using Java's relatively-new "annotation" feature, which, broadly speaking, has some of the same mojo as Lisp macros, when used properly.

On the other hand, you can do a lot better even in Java. Look at Spring and the other new post-J2EE frameworks. The experience with J2EE has led to learning and improvement in these new "dependency-injection" frameworks, which is definitely a good thing for the Java world.